United States or Tonga ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Thirlstone had hunted in Somaliland and done mighty slaughter; while I had spent some never-to-be forgotten weeks long ago in the hinterland of Zanzibar, in the days before railways and game-preserves.
To the American Bahá’í Community, the chief executor of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Divine Plan; to the British Bahá’í Community, destined to play in future decades a predominating role in opening to the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh not only the British territories throughout the African continent, but the divers dependencies of the British Crown scattered on the surface of the globe; to the Persian Bahá’í Community, at once the most venerable and most consistently persecuted among its sister communities in both the East and the West; to the Egyptian Bahá’í Community that may well boast of having erected in that continent the first pillar of the Universal House of Justice; to the Indian Bahá’í Community, fated to contribute, to a marked degree, to the spiritual quickening of the Indians constituting a noble element of the population of Africa—to these communities I feel I must acknowledge my deep sense of thankfulness for the strenuous efforts exerted by their pioneers to raise aloft the standard of the Faith in the territories allocated to them in Liberia, Uganda, Tanganyika, the Gold Coast, Kenya, Somaliland, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, Libya, Algeria, Zanzibar and Madagascar.
In Somaliland, for instance, for the price I paid for my nine, I could get one hundred and sixty-three camels! But the Somali camel from all accounts is a very poor performer, compared to his kinsman in the Antipodes, his load being about 200 lbs. against the Australian's 6 to 9 cwt.
Doubtless Allah smote the English mad to prevent them from stealing the whole world.... If they were not mad they would do so and enslave all other races except their conquerors, the Dervishes, of course.... It was like the lying hypocrites to call the Great Mullah "the Mad Mullah" knowing themselves to be mad, and being afraid of their victorious enemy who had driven them out of Somaliland to the coast forts....
"We were big-game hunting, lion and rhino preferred, along the border of Somaliland," he continued. "Besides the pony and camel men, we had four Somali shikaris, trained trackers, who knew the habits of beasts and read their tracks and signs like a book; men of a breed whose women will not give themselves as wives except to men who have scored kills of both royal game and men.
The winds from the Indian Ocean crossing the highlands of Abyssinia are wrung nearly dry while passing the mountains, and so Somaliland and the lowlands to the south of Abyssinia are parched.
Just as in the early days of British Somaliland, rascals would descend from nowhere in particular upon unfortunate villages, levy taxes and administer atrocity in the name of the Empire, and even, I am told, outface for a time the modest heralds of the government, so in this department of anthropology the public mind suffers from the imposition of theories and assertions claiming to be "scientific," which have no more relation to that organized system of criticism which is science, than a brigand at large on a mountain has to the machinery of law and police, by which finally he will be hanged.
I do not mean to say that it is generally "understanded of the people," any more than Latin is throughout the Catholic world; but it is the language of most Sunnites and is moderately understood in Somaliland, East Africa, Java and the Malay peninsula as the language of the Koran; in fact, it is the only written language in Somaliland, and Turkey uses the script though not the tongue.
Today, in 1965, there might have been a few wandering tribesmen in Somaliland or the Kirghiz Steppes who had never heard of the Western Union's Philadelphia Project, or of the Fourth Komintern's Red Triumph Five-Year Plan, or of the Islamic Kaliphate's Al-Borak Undertaking, or of the Ibero-American Confederation's Cavor Project, but every literate person in the world knew that the four great power-blocs were racing desperately to launch the first spaceship to reach the Moon and build the Lunar fortress that would insure world supremacy.
We have recently seen a distressing example in the death of the lamented Mr. Ingram in Somaliland, who, although well mounted, was overtaken by an infuriated wild elephant and killed. This was a female, and it appears that Mr. Ingram, having followed her on horseback, had fired repeatedly with a rifle only .450.
Word Of The Day